As the number of connected devices worldwide continues to grow, IT device management vendor Axonius has been working on a technology platform to ease the management burdens of all those dissimilar devices for enterprises.
To continue its momentum, the company just announced that it is getting a new $4 million round of seed funding for further work on its still-in-development Axonius platform.
The funding, which is coming from investors YL Ventures, with participation from Vertex Ventures and Emerge, will allow the company to move forward with its technology as it readies it for a general release early in 2018.
The Axonius platform is designed to connect to a wide range of mobile device management (MDM), IoT, desktop management, Apple device management, cloud management and other related IT systems management applications. After the connections are established, enterprise administrators can then make configuration and policy changes and perform other tasks across all of those multiple management applications at once, rather than having to make the changes within each application one at a time. This provides enterprise systems administrators with one place to understand, manage and control the security of end users, systems and IoT devices, according to the company.
The idea for the Axonius approach came because enterprises must use multiple applications – upwards of 10 to 20 at a time – to properly and securely manage all of their divergent IT devices, from smartphones to tablets, desktops, the cloud and more, Dean Sysman, Axonius CEO and co-founder, told ITPro.
By building the Axonius platform and using "adapters" and plug-ins to connect to various management applications, the company can help enterprises simplify the configuration and administration of their management requirements, he said. Open APIs are being used alongside simple graphical user interfaces to allow enterprises to connect device types and tools to the platform.
"We are here because others aren't fixing this yet," Sysman said. Ten to 15 years ago, companies didn't have so many separate management systems, so it was simpler to perform these tasks, he added.
That's where Axonius wants to help, by showing enterprises how these tasks can be done once and distributed to all necessary management systems at one time.
"We're saying keep your existing products but we will connect to all of them, consolidate it all into one view and bring control and policy all together," Sysman said. "We take care of the underlying infrastructure."
Using Axonius saves users from having to monitor 10 to 20 different dashboards or more, while also allowing them to use the same procedures for multiple management applications.
So far, the company is working with early adopters and enterprises in Israel and the United States who are using the platform. General release of Axonius is expected in early 2018, according to the company.
Eric Ogren, an analyst with 451 Research, told ITPro that Axonius' approach to the problem by making changes at the network level is intriguing. "I do believe the network is the point where we are going to start controlling devices because the network doesn't lie," he said. "It's here where security and enforcement of policies is going on."
Ogren said this could be the "leading edge of a trend" toward similar management controls for enterprises. "It just makes a lot of sense to look at what's happening. It gives enterprises more presence to see things they couldn't see otherwise."
